jar jar BiNks loves me..now he thinks im a karma whore who doesn't get some-(sigh.)

Anyway, strategy does play a big part to whom is victorious and because u can't kill off carriers fast enough or kill off a carrier composed fleet build up then your sure to die from bomber swarms. If your going to turtle then build carriers otherwise don't turtle with a carrier-less fleet.

Assailants + flak + subverters 

if u fall victim to hc then

Assailants + flak + subverters + enforcers

The probable reason why bombers hurt jar jar is because your caps always get sniped lol.. dont build caps, build hc

Why are you censoring yourself?  What are you, ten?

Anyway, if you want strategy, cut the fleet supply in half.  There's your strategy.  Forces you to have to think about what you build.

If the enemy is spamming enough bombers to snipe your caps before you can retreat them, countering with heavy cruisers is not a good idea, because HCs are even weaker to bombers than caps are.

A huge late-game fleet like that might be best countered with (a very large opposing fleet of) mostly flak. Depending on the number of enemy bombers you might want to avoid sending your own caps in altogether or they might just die to the bombers when the cap warps in.

Cap abilities are nice, but in the face of large enemy bomber/LRF spam they come at a very significant cost: your cap(s) will die, especially if they're at anything other than very low levels.

And when fleets are that large, Scramble Bombers and Embargo are of very little use and certainly don't come anywhere close to deciding the game. Scramble Bombers is great in the early-mid game when one or two or three extra bomber squads every 30 seconds can be a very significant boost to your anti-cap/anti-structure/anti-Orki firepower, but if you get the cap just for Scramble Bombers in the late-game you'd be much better off building normal carrier cruisers, which would simply have more strike-craft firepower per cost and supply.

And Embargo is only really that useful in the early-game, or if your enemy is very bad at fleet logistics and can't scare your Sova out of his gravity well relatively quickly. When fleets are so large to have extreme numbers of LRF or bombers, what matters is fleet firepower, not income (plus, your Sova will be focus-fired upon and will die).

Read master1a's post again. He has a point (and is one of the best players on ICO, if not the best - he knows what he's talking about).

Regardless of fleet supply, you have to make strategic decisions about what kind of ship to build, about where to position your fleet, when to move your frig factories, when to build defenses, when to retreat, when to attack an enemy's HW or to culture them to death, when to build trade ports or to feed allies, when to send a SB, when to double a dangerous player even if it means you yourself lose to the guy on the other side of you...

There is a whole lot to Sins than "1. Spam 2. Win".

Still matters and still relevant (also does wonders with the lag).  Besides, Sins is best played LANed.

well, with new unit types entering the fray, the corvettes... the prevailing theory is that they will somehow help the late-game massed bomber tactic.

On the other hand, I dont see why flak don't just get a power that amplifies their anti-bomber power while reducing all other effectiveness (switching targeting modes). I don't think any flaks have powers. Just make it a researched higher-tier power so that it's not around the early game, and you can successfully counter just massed bombers more effectively without changing anything else.

If that's too much of a silver bullet, make the power only last a a short duration, then you have to micro your flaks to use it most effectively.

Well, i have recently make a test with 125 starbase onscreen in a single gravity wheel... was more that 6.5 million poly onscreen and no slow down...

Problem with CPU lag is not what is on screen but what you don't see... game engine keep track of everything everywhere... in late game on huge map with several player, there is a huge amount of object ( planet, ship, trade ship, fighter, bomber, refinery ship, etc )... you don't see all of them, they are somewhere else in the "galaxy" but they use CPU resource...

Stardock/ironclad have speak of a better collision detection and/or path finding for rebellion... it is something who can help to ease the CPU load... don't know for the sins AI but AI can use a lot of resource too... anyway, when compared to the original engine, recent version have been greatly improved and it seem that devs plan to continue their good work with Rebellion...